So just to clarify - yes it's both ui and viewport. I relate it to UI because it doesn't seem to be a draw call issue in the viewport. It's not a matter of throwing too many objects on there or anything like that. In fact, as far as I can tell adjusting a parameter will play back with no issues.

Using it on my laptop again and it's smooth as butter on this. The only large upgrade my laptop has I think over my desktop is a newer processor - and … this might be significant - DDR 4 Ram.

Should I add this to buglist?

“.. In fact, as far as I can tell adjusting a parameter will play back with no issues…”

You bring up a good point.

As far as my situation is concerned…I can manually scrub back and forth in the MotionFx window with the Frame Indicator and this means it's rolling over CHOP channels that are changing the paramters of my object and I have no issues with the scene updating quickly.

Yet, staying on any given single frame with no parameters changing, as I mentioned before, moving my mouse for panning, rotating, etc. in the scene view window gives a laggy/stutter like behaviour.

Maybe you are using the production build which had some slowdown issue, try the newest daily build.

Hi Daniel - That's what I'm currently on. Well I'm on yesterday's build. I'll try today's as well, but I've tried the production build, as well as a few different dailies.

Thanks for the suggestion man.

BTW pretty new here. Gotta say this is a pretty cool community. Everyone's real helpful.

I reported a UI performance problem during beta, and it was signed off as UTR. I am still seeing it even in the latest daily builds. Are you seeing a progressive slowing of the UI, especially menus? The longer a session is used for, the more unusable it becomes.

The regression is pretty gradual so it's a bit hard to tell … I usually shut it off before it becomes unusable. It just bugs me that much. That being said - I left a session on for awhile on my desktop and it felt much more sluggish than when I initially open H16.

Also when I first open H16 - I usually get about 15 sec of no lag.

That sounds familiar, although it generally takes longer for me notice a problem. I haven't noticed issues with the viewport since the release build.

Oh man.. yea that would actually be great if I could get that much.

On my laptop though it's so quick. No issues whatsoever.

Hi All,

FYI that I have a consistent test case for reproducing the gradual slow down with menus. I'm not sure if that will also fix the other stutter and lag issues mentioned in this thread but hopefully it's all related.

I'll post back in this thread once I've committed a fix.

Cheers,
Rob

jsmack
I reported a UI performance problem during beta, and it was signed off as UTR. I am still seeing it even in the latest daily builds. Are you seeing a progressive slowing of the UI, especially menus? The longer a session is used for, the more unusable it becomes.

Ha, I was probably the one that UTR'd the bug because I couldn't replicate the problem at the time. Weird though, usually I reply back with questions or requests for more test steps when I UTR.

Anyway, do you have the bug number? I'll re-open it and then tag it when I commit a fix for the menu problem.

Cheers,
Rob

Hurrah!!

Sorry btw Rob - I didn't mean to turn this into a bug report. Just wasn't sure if it was actually a bug or if I just needed to adjust some settings on my system.

jsmack
Are you seeing a progressive slowing of the UI, especially menus? The longer a session is used for, the more unusable it becomes.

This. Houdini 15.5 ran just fine on a Mac book pro. No issues.

As a temp workaround, I reload the desktop and it starts to respond. I am not even doing heavy scenes.

Also, Houdini 16 always ends with a crash, when I quit the program ( v16.0.504.20 ). I will try the daily build and see if the issues persist.

Arvin Villapando
Hurrah!!

Sorry btw Rob - I didn't mean to turn this into a bug report. Just wasn't sure if it was actually a bug or if I just needed to adjust some settings on my system.

No worries Arvin!

I committed a fix for laggy UI performance triggered by repeatedly opening and closing certain menus in Houdini. The fix appears in tomorrow's 16.0.544 build.

I'm not sure if that will also fix the stuttering problem that you mentioned because the behaviour for that issue sounds a bit different but it's worth giving tomorrow's or Monday's build a try.

And if the stuttering still happens then best to submit a bug report with steps to reproduce. I know it's tough coming up with steps if the stuttering gradually appears over time but any kind of info or patterns that you notice would be helpful in trying to reproduce the bug on our end.

Cheers,
Rob

Sorry hadn't had a chance to test the new builds. I downloaded the latest on Tuesday - 547, and it looked like it worked initially. I was messing around for… idk.. 15 mins. I stopped it, worked on some other stuff, and didn't boot it til now. It's got the same issues again. Better… but it still has slowdown.

Thanks for all the help. Submitting a bug report. Will keep the thread posted in case anyone runs into the same issues in the future.

Quick update… I've discovered one thing that makes sense, and one thing that's rather odd.

So I discovered that if I clear the ram it speeds up again. So if Houdini is what I start first on boot - on build 559 btw - it loads up fine. As things start to load into ram, whether that's me switching to another program, or that's something done by Houdini, it begins to slow down. I've ran a few instances and I think this is the case.

I also use software to clear my memory and that will temporarily fix the problem as well. A few minutes later, or if I switch process it starts again.

The second thing - this one has me a bit baffled - is that recording my screen using obs seems to get rid of the problem. I tried to record to demonstrate and inadvertently discovered this. Starting recording seems to fix the issue, and it starts back up as soon as I stop capture.

Strange indeed. I believe OBS is using system RAM (and CPU) to do the h.264 encoding, so it might be (again, wild guessing) that there is some memory preferencing going bonkers. Have you tried, just to narrow down what is going on, to deactivate virtual memory for a test run?
My idea here is that maybe OBS is requesting a large chunk of memory, which forces the OS to do a garbage collection, leaving you with larger memory blocks available. If that is the case, the best you can do is check your system in “normal state” for memory usage, maybe you have some tool running that is constantly requesting small chunks of memory, so that Houdini, once it boots, gets virtual memory assigned instead of physical memory.
(/wild guess mode off)

Marc

Ran a check and definitely not running virtual memory. Such a weird issue. Especially because the solution is strange. Run another program that takes up resources to run better.

Also ran an fps counter… it shows a constant >120 even with frame stuttering.. so that part doesn't make sense.

I have the same problem, very laggy UI and viewport. Few days back everything was ok. Tried daily build, several nvidia driver, nothing helps. Houdini 15.5 works perfectly. Please help us.

Hi guys - pinging this again. Sorry I contacted support but they can't seem to recreate the bug.

They suggested trying to guess and check on processes that may be doing it, but nothing.

Mathef - could you please try downloading OBS and screen capturing. For some reason if I wait about 5 sec. after I start recording, Houdini's issues go away. I thought this might have something to do with OBS forcing Windows to turn off certain display effects so I tried manually turning effects off, but no results there either. But yes - please check to see if this will work and maybe it can help pin point the bug.

Okay update - so after some research I found out that both Nvidia and Windows have a game DVR running in the background. There have been reports of lag in games because of these. For some reason they are treating Houdini as a game, I think, and thus slowing it down. My guess is that recording with OBS forced these processes to idle and thus gave Houdini a steady stream. I disabled both, and it's given some noticeable improvement, but still not up to full speed.

I added the info to the bug report to see if it'll help them reproduce the error.